Prep Awards Ceremony

Thornton families celebrate students’ achievements at the end of the school year.

The Prep School awards ceremony gave staff the opportunity to celebrate everyone’s success stories through the school and to also present individual certificates for achievement, effort, progress and service.

We were honoured to have the company of Paralympic athlete Anna Turney this year. A top mono-skier, she has represented Great Britain in two Paralympics. Her perseverance after being injured in a snowboarding competition nearly 10 years ago, combined with her positive outlook on life, made her a perfect speaker for our event.

In a heart-lifting speech, she talked about the challenges she has faced in her adult life and how she has overcome them.

As a child, Anna said, she loved to dance and to ride horses. Alongside these hobbies, she developed a real passion for skiing and snowboarding and worked hard enough at these to get selected for the British Olympic squad.

A monumental crash on the snow slopes, however, left her paralysed and she had to learn to rebuild both her body and mind. But forge ahead she did and four years of determination and immense self-belief led her to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver followed by a slew of medals.

In 2014, she came fourth in the Sochi Paralympics. ‘I felt like I’d failed,’ she said. ‘But my friends and family made me realise how proud they were. It is very hard in life to achieve something on your own. People inspired me and helped me to seize these opportunities. If we work really hard and believe in ourselves we can achieve the things we never thought possible.’